Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Killing Units)  Oral History

Frima L.

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 US Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections

Transcript

One morning, very early, we heard knocking on the doors and the windows and yelling, you know, "Get out, get out, get out." So quickly we got dressed and we walked out of the house that we were staying in. Uh, the Gestapo was there and...uh...they, they told us all to go in a certain direction. Uh...my mother put on me my, my beautiful, uh, rabbit coat that I had. My rabbit coat and a hat. And we started following the other people, and they took us to a large building. Must have been a factory, and, uh, they told us to get undressed. And they would make you take off the jewelry and everything...any valuables that you had on you. They undressed...they told us to get undressed. We all did. The women remained with the underwear only, and the men in their shorts. And my mother wasn't fast enough to take off her gold earrings so she was hit by a Gestapo with, uh, the handle of a rifle. And, uh, she fell down. We picked her up. And, uh, all of us...there were a few hundred of us...we were all already undressed, and we had to form lines outside. It was a cloudy day, very cloudy, and a very fine drizzle was coming down. And all the women were so embarrassed that they were without anything on top that they all covered their...their breasts with their hands. And...uh...they made groups, and we started walking the street following the other people. As we were passing some of those streets, there were some Ukrainians who were cheering as we were walking by, and they were applauding and cheering that this, this what was done to us. We kept on walking silently without saying anything until we were out of the city.

While Frima's family was confined to a ghetto, Nazis used her father as an interpreter. He later perished. By pretending not to be Jews, Frima, her mother, and sister escaped a German mobile killing unit massacre. They were later discovered and jailed. Again, her mother devised an escape. Frima's mother and sister were smuggled to Romania, while Frima wandered in search of safekeeping until her mother could arrange to smuggle her out. In Romania, they were reunited and liberated.